from the self-(publishing)-esteem dept

Bestselling author Barry Eisler is best known among readers for characters like John Rain and Ben Treven in his thriller novels. Among watchers of the publishing industry, he's known for something else too: having navigated and found great success in both the legacy industry and the new world of self-publishing. In this episode of the Techdirt Podcast, he discusses the evolving culture and business model of publishing with his uniquely comprehensive insight.

from the bwah!?!? dept

There's no doubt that even closely related or allied countries treat the issue of free speech quite differently. Perhaps our most natural European cultural equivalent, Britain, has laws that I often find either confusing or silly, with a particular eye towards their long-panned libel laws. But even correcting for cultural differences, I'm having a real hard time figuring out how a UK court can issue an injunction barring the publishing of an author's recounting of his own personal history with sexual abuse at his ex-wife's request. You'll have to forgive the vagueness here, because there are simply no names being discussed on the matter due to the ongoing litigation.

A British performing artist has been forced to shelve a book based on his experiences of childhood sexual abuse after his ex-wife obtained an injunction to prevent their young son from reading it. In a case that is alarming freedom of speech campaigners and which publishers say is deeply disturbing, the court of appeal has ordered that the artist cannot publish key sections of the book until the issue has been decided at trial.

However, his ex-wife’s lawyers dispute claims that the case could set a precedent undermining the rights of other authors, arguing that it is concerned only with the rights of one child, who has a number of health problems, who they say would suffer catastrophic psychological distress were he to read parts of his father’s work.

Let me flesh this out for you a bit. A well-known artist in the UK is publishing a memoir, including sections that deal with the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. His ex-wife obtained the injunction on publishing that factual account of his life because she believes it will harm, by her lawyer's own admission, a single child the two had together. That child is suffering a wide range of health problems, including Asperger's Syndrome, and the ex-wife is suggesting that reading the father's account would cause further harm. All of this, by the way, relies on a Victorian-era case the dealt with the intentional psychological harm some guy perpetrated on a woman in a bar by playing a practical joke on her. Seriously, I'm not making that crap up.

To be clear, the injunction is temporary, but the alarming part is that the court seems to be staying the publication in order to ask an incomplete question.

While accepting that there was a public interest in the book being published, the court granted a temporary injunction and ruled that the question of whether the boy’s rights should take priority over those of his father should be decided at a full trial.

The problem here is that the court shouldn't be tossing that public interest out so easily. Imagine, if you will, a court system that disallows factual information to be revealed simply because someone may find it unpleasant. In this particular case, we have a child with medical issues to consider, a potentially sympathetic "victim", but it need not be so, based on the law if this case sets the wrong precedent. You might simply see young children used as excuses to keep controversial information from ever seeing the light of day.

Add on top of that the concept of keeping a victim of sexual abuse from being able to do as he pleases with that information and we're suddenly diving into the arena in which the government is abusing him all over again. Not overtly, of course, but if intimidating homosexuals into staying in the closet is abuse, and it is, the same should be said of abuse-victims being prevented from telling their factual stories. Above and beyond all that, the parents could have tried to reach an agreement to simply not allow their child to read the book until a certain age.

Instead, the mysterious ex-wife is robbing the public of a piece of literature in order to protect her son from being parented. Hey, my UK peeps: either you have free speech or you don't. I know you don't have our Constitution, but if the status of speech is such that you can't write about your own lives, you may have a problem.

Not for the first time, my comment didn't make it past the censor moderator. Why? Did I use obscene language? Insult anyone? Engage in unacceptably trollish behavior? Or did I simply link to a few posts that offer opposing viewpoints? It's funny, I write about the AG, and former president Scott Turow, and AG pitchman Richard Russo, and Douglas Preston's self-serving anti-Amazon efforts fairly regularly. And I always link to, and extensively quote from, anything I'm discussing. Not just because I want my readers to be able to make up their own minds. Not just because I have some integrity. But also because I want people to see exactly what the AG and its legacy-publishing shills are saying. Their positions are so illogical, so self-contradictory, and so self-serving that I believe the more light I can shine on them, the better people will understand what the AG and its people are really about.

But when an organization tries to conceal what its critics are saying, it's fair to surmise that something else is driving its behavior. And I don't know what that thing could be other than fear of contrary opinions the organization senses are more compelling than the organization's propaganda. Because really, what can you say about an organization so brittle, so insular, so fearful... that it won't even permit a few contrary links in a comment section? What can you say about an organization calling itself an "Authors Guild"... that censors the voices of authors whose opinions it doesn't like?

from the the-first-rule-of-price-gouging... dept

The world of academic publishing is highly profitable -- and, apparently, highly sustainable. There's no shortage of content seeking publication as researchers, professors, etc. seek to have their work published and cited. Handing even more power over to publishers by linking publication with tenure, universities have sabotaged their own interests by giving academic publishers every reason to increase subscription rates.

It's not as though this has gone unnoticed. Backlash against exorbitant access fees withholding publicly-funded research from the public led to a boycott of Elsevier unless it withdrew its support of the Research Works Act, which sought to lock up even more academic works. Though more than 30,000 scientists joined the boycott (and Elsevier withdrew its support of the Act), little has changed in the academic publishing world.

A journal's editorial board has been left on the brink of resignation after an eight-month standoff with its publisher Taylor & Francis over the publication of a debate on academic publishing and the profits made by major firms.

Its “proposition” paper, “Publisher, be damned! from price gouging to the open road”, by four academics from the University of Leicester's School of Management, criticises the large profits made by commercial publishers on the back of academics' labours, and the failure of the Finch report on open access to address them.

The full paper is embedded below and, as you can see, Taylor & Francis have helpfully time-stamped it with my IP address.

The paper compares publishers with the music industry, noting that the latter saw surging sales once it began pricing its offerings more realistically. It also posits that less strenuous infringement countermeasures could help push prices down. But most damningly, it examines the rates charged by publishers, comparing those of for-profit entities with those of non-profits.

What has been characterised as rampant price inflation is one characteristic of the market in academic journals – or at least those journals published by commercial publishers – with several studies since 2000 indicating rapidly increasing prices charged by for-profit publishers (Bergstrom, 2001; Bergstrom and Bergstrom, 2004; Dewatripont et al., 2007; Harvie et al., 2012). Bergstrom and Bergstrom (2004) suggest that a journal page published by a for-profit publisher is between three and five times more expensive than one published by a not-for-profit publisher. One factor driving increasing prices is journal reputation (Bergstrom, 2001) – but this leads to increasing profit margins (McCabe, 2004). In short, widely-cited journals are perceived to be higher quality, which allows for-profit publishers to charge higher prices for such journals; if widely-cited and more highly-priced journals also enjoy higher circulation (because they are widely-cited), then publishers also benefit through lower average production costs (McCabe, 2004; Dewatripont et al., 2007).

The more widely-cited a journal is, the more likely it is to be published on a larger-scale (reducing costs) and the more desirable it is as a destination for submissions (lowering costs yet again). With this desirability comes the privilege of increasing prices, something for-profit publishers aren't exactly shy about doing.

But this generates expenses for other entities who aren't part of this self-sustaining feedback loop, often causing them to cannibalize related services to the detriment of the schools themselves.

Since 1999, spending on books has fallen by almost a ﬁfth in real terms, and from almost 12 per cent of libraries' total spending to just over 8 per cent. Expenditure on serials, on the other hand, has increased sharply: from just under £70 million to over £130 million. In real terms this represents an increase of 63 per cent; journals' share of total library spending rose from 16 per cent to almost 20 per cent. (Harvie et al., 2012, p.910)

Needless to say, Taylor & Francis wasn't interested in publishing a critique of its business model. So, it stalled the publication of this article for several months. (It was originally due to be published September 2013.)

The journal's general editor, Stuart Macdonald, a visiting professor of economics at Aalto University in Finland, said the non-appearance of the journal in September was followed, two months later, by a letter from a senior manager at Taylor & Francis demanding that more than half of the proposition article be cut.

“They never said why. They just said they didn't want this debate to take place,” Professor Macdonald said. “They also said I should have got their approval before inviting debate papers, but I have never done that before and it seems quite improper.”

He said matters came to a head at a “very unpleasant” meeting in January, when the journal’s editorial board threatened to resign en masse unless Taylor & Francis backed down.

This threat forced a half-assed capitulation from Taylor & Francis. It agreed to publish the paper but imposed several limitations. First, it stripped publishers' names from the paper and the four responses. Then, when it finally cleared it to run, it appended this footnote to the first page.

Disclaimer: Opinions and views expressed in this article (the Proposition) are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the content of this article. Any opinions and views expressed in this article are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the article should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information.

The academic publishing industry, as in the Prometheus debate on open access, has previously been happy to throw itself into the fray. Not so on this occasion. Many, many individuals working in the industry were invited to respond to the Proposition paper; not a one felt able to accept. It was made all too clear that the industry was in no mood for this debate. Indeed, at one time the editors were asked to excise the major part of the Proposition paper. Our refusal and ensuing negotiations explain why this debate was not published as intended in September 2013, and why no issue of Prometheus has appeared since.

The editorial, written by Professor Stuart Macdonald, also calls into question the publisher's decision to act as an editor.

But are academic publishers intruding in the editorial role? For example, without reference to any editor, the names of all academic publishers have been expunged from the Response papers in this issue. Institutional anonymity is already a custom in management studies, one that has done little for the standing of the subject. It would be unfortunate were it to spread throughout the social sciences, driving academic research from the empirical to the theoretical and abstract.

This isn't the first time an academic publisher has blocked publication because of subject matter, but this is usually due to outside forces, like the demands of corporations. In this case, however, it was an inside job. Not only did Taylor & Francis do all it could to prevent a discussion about its practices, but it also had a detrimental affect on other submissions. As MacDonald notes, he withheld other issues of the journal that were awaiting publication because he believed Taylor & Francis would give those preference over the problematic proposition paper. This has resulted in a backlog of papers awaiting publication, one that doesn't look to be eased any time soon.

With the trust between the publisher and the editors effectively destroyed by Taylor & Francis' actions, other options are being explored, including branching off into self-publishing. Unfortunately, any other routes taken will do very little to impact the publisher, or make it reconsider further transparently self-interested moves in the future.

from the funny-that dept

Just a few weeks ago we wrote about scientific publishing giant Nature's somewhat abhorrent open access policy, where it's telling researchers at universities that require open access publishing that they need to get a waiver from that policy. So it seems rather strange to see that very same Nature, just days later, publishing an article about open access, in which it talks about how two of the largest funders of scientific research today, Wellcome Trust in the UK and the National Institute for Health (NIH) in the US, are starting to punish grant recipients who don't follow through on open access obligations. Both of those organizations require certain open access standards, but apparently have mostly just trusted researchers to follow through. Not any more:

Now they are done with just dangling carrots. Both institutions are bringing out the sticks: cautiously and discreetly cracking down on researchers who do not make their papers publicly available.

Neither agency would name those who have been sanctioned. But the London-based Wellcome Trust says that it has withheld grant payments on 63 occasions in the past year because papers resulting from the funding were not open access. And the NIH, in Bethesda, Maryland, says that it has delayed some continuing grant awards since July 2013 because of non-compliance with open-access policies, although the agency does not know the exact numbers.

The report notes that this has resulted in a "noticeable jump in researchers following the rules." That makes sense.

Of course, nowhere in the Nature article does reporter Richard Van Noorden ever bother to mention that his own publication is fighting against those requirements. In fact, the article reads as if it's a strong supporter of open access rules:

Some scientists are not even aware that they could be penalized. Nature's news team contacted Sheila MacNeil, a tissue engineer at the University of Sheffield, UK, who has published hundreds of articles, including a March 2013 paper on making stem-cell lattices for corneal repair that was funded by the Wellcome Trust (I. Ortega et al. Acta Biomater. 9, 5511–5520; 2013). Nature pointed out that the article should be open access but is not. "This is new to me," responds MacNeil, who plans to make the paper available. "Agreeing with open access is easy — making it happen, less so," she says.

Perhaps the Nature "news team" should take a look at how their own publisher is forcing researchers to ignore their open access obligations.

from the moral-rights dept

The UK-based Wellcome Trust is the second-largest non-governmental funder of medical research after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It was one of the main backers of the Human Genome Project, which pioneered the idea of open data by placing all its results in the public domain, and of open access. Recently, it began a new project exploring openness:

First there was open source software, given away for anybody to download, use and share without charge. Then there was open access publishing, the movement to make the results of scientific research freely available to read without paying journal subscription fees. Today, the Wellcome Trust is launching a fresh experiment in open information, this time in science journalism.

Mosaic, our new digital publication devoted to long-form features about the science of life, is not only free for anybody to read. Its content is also freely available for anybody else to republish or share through their own publications and platforms.

when we were starting out on the development of Mosaic, one of the first principles we put in place was that the features we published should have a Creative Commons (CC) licence. We want as many people to be able to read our stories as possible, and so we’ll be publishing features on the Mosaic site and making it simple for others to take our content and re-use it.

While Creative Commons is well established in scholarly circles, its use in journalism is still relatively sparse. The investigative journalism newsroom Propublica, and The Conversation, which brings together professional editors and university experts, both publish under CC licences (do let us know if you know of other examples).

The license we’ve chosen for Mosaic is Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY), which is the most open of the licences.

Well, arguably CC0 is more open -- it's akin to placing something in the public domain, with no restrictions whatsoever. Still, CC-BY is certainly an extremely generous license, allowing almost anything to be done with the articles, provided authorship is acknowledged. Of course, that could be problematic, as the Wellcome Trust recognizes:

Might adaptation, if done poorly, damage our reputation for quality and depth, or the author’s reputation? Might some adaptations distort the story? In the former case, the original, crafted version will always be on the Mosaic site, the licence allows us to insist that attribution requires a link back and and that the edited nature of an adapted or abridged piece must be signposted. In the latter case, the licence protects the author’s 'moral rights', which include the right not to have the work distorted, mutilated, modified or subjected to derogatory action which would be prejudicial to the author’s honour or reputation.

it appears such cases [of distortion] are very few and far between and problems that do arise are usually due to miscommunication or misunderstanding. What is more, it is the nature of the internet that work published even under the most restrictive licences is often taken and adapted by others without any consent -- while often illegal, this is extremely difficult to police. So while it was good to think through potential issues, our conclusion was that we should offer our work in good faith. We trust others' editorial judgment.

That's both a good summary of the situation, and an eminently pragmatic solution. If only more publishers adopted it, instead of trying to stamp out every kind of unauthorized online use, however minor, and however disproportionate the effort required.

from the before-the-DMCA,-did-people-just-break-into-libraries-and-steal-microfiche? dept

Update: An Autharium representative reached out to the Passive Voice blog to admit that sending a DMCA takedown was a "mistake". It's not clear whether this means that it was done in error, or that they've acknowledged their attempted abuse of the system.

The DMCA notice: the multi-tool abused by many. The most common abusive form is the issuance of takedowns to muffle criticism, which is what we have here.

Autharium, a British ebook self-publishing platform, took a bit of a beating last March for its absolutely horrendous Terms and Conditions. Passive Voice, a writer-oriented blog, was the first to expose just how much authors were giving up when they signed with Autharium. In exchange for publishing through Autharium, authors gave the platform exclusive WORLDWIDE rights to "produce, publish, promote, market and sell your Work in any Digital Form" for "the entire legal term of copyright." That's life plus 70 years in the UK.

If an author somehow managed to talk Autharium into reverting the copyright back to him or her, Autharium still retained exclusive, worldwide digital distribution rights. And "any Digital Form" included far more than just ebooks. Paragraph 1.4 of the publishing T&C originally listed the following as being under Autharium's exclusive control.

“Digital Form” means any and all electronic and/or digital forms and media whether now known or later invented or developed including (by way of examples only): (i) any e-book (i.e. using any means of manufacture, distribution or transmission whether now known or later developed including but not limited to electronic and machine-readable media and online and satellite based transmission intended to make your Work available for reading) (“eBook”); and (ii) any electronic version (other than an eBook) for performance and display (whether sequentially or not) in any manner (together with accompanying sounds, images, interactive and/or search features if any) by any electronic means, method or device (“Electronic Version”).

Word quickly spread around the web to other author/ebook-oriented sites like Writer Beware and The Digital Reader. The consensus was that this contract was even more exploitative than those offered by other infamous self-publishing platforms/vanity presses like Author Solutions.

For avoidance of doubt this does not include physical or audio book forms, videos, film, television, merchandise or game forms.

As it noted on top of the "new" T&C page, this was overhauled in March of 2013, an effort which stripped away almost everything ridiculous and exploitative about the original. This massive restructuring allowed Autharium to add the following line to its "About" page, something it couldn't honestly have said at any point before the March 2013 revamp. (The wording isn't present in previous versions.)

No draconian length of copyright contracts, no signing away of movie, merchandising or physical book rights.

So far, so good. While it's a shame Autharium felt the original T&C was somehow acceptable, it did at least respond quickly to the criticism by making extensive changes. If only Autharium had left it at that.

While it could technically be argued that the "copyrighted text" was "taken" without permission, what was actually included in Passive Voice's post was five paragraphs out of 83 total. And it was clearly used as part of the commentary. It's very difficult to explain what's wrong with a contract's Terms & Conditions without quoting it directly, as was done here. Furthermore, there's nothing in the site's Terms & Conditions that forbids use of the site's text in this fashion.

This has every appearance of a company -- which originally did the right thing and fixed its horrendous contractual text -- attempting to whitewash the past, starting with the blog post that triggered the backlash. But why? Why do this when you've already addressed the problematic T&C and have started to win writers back?

In the opinion of many, including PG [Passive Guy, blogger at Passive Voice], the legal remedies for bad faith takedown notices that are simply attempts at censorship are inadequate. For a further discussion of this problem, see this post on the WordPress Blog.

PG thinks an alternate remedy – sunlight – might work the best in this case.

Here is PG’s original commentary on the Autharium language without the inclusion of any language from the Autharium terms of service. PG is including his commentary so his opinions about what he believed to be unfair contract terms as they existed on March 10, 2013, will show up on Google.

Fortunately, The Passive Voice has a large enough audience so Google incorporates new posts into its search database very quickly.

And sunlight Autharium will receive. Instead of simply acknowledging that it had screwed up in the past, Autharium is trying to bury it. It changed its T&C for the better, but is now undoing any forward momentum by attempting to erase the past. This will only result in another round of negative press, and a company that used to look exploitative will now become a company that is currently censorious.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Publishing content digitally is a topic that comes up around here fairly regularly. If you're a longtime Techdirt reader, you'll know that we generally think digital publishing drives down the price of content to free (but that doesn't mean your work is worthless!) and giving away content is often a very effective promotional tactic for selling other things that can't be freely copied. Here are just a few interesting examples of free content you can peruse at your leisure.

The Mars Curiosity rover has been a huge boon for NASA -- tapping into the public's fascination with space exploration and the search for life on other planets. Its landing was watched live by millions of people, and interest in the photos and videos it is collecting is so great, that NASA has had to relocate its servers to deal with the capacity.

So what does NASA do to reward this outpouring of public interest (not to mention to $2.5 billion taxpayer dollars that made it possible)? They publish the first papers to arise from the project behind a Science magazine's paywall

It's a great point: here was a fantastic opportunity to build on the evident excitement among the general public brought about by the Mars Rover project, and to deepen people's interest in science, and yet NASA prevented that by stupidly locking up its papers behind a paywall. Eisen decided to do something about it:

This whole situation is even more absurd, because US copyright law explicitly says that all works of the federal government -- of which these surely must be included -- are not subject to copyright. So, in the interests of helping NASA and Science Magazine comply with US law, I am making copies of these papers freely available here

As of today [27th September] these articles are now available to download from the JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] website. I assume this was done in response to this post and the attention it received. (They were not there on the 26th when the press releases went out -- I looked. And you can see from the PDFs that they weren't downloaded from the Science website until the 27th.) Let's hope that in the future that all NASA papers -- and indeed the results of all government funded research -- are made immediately freely available.

It's great news that Eisen's actions did not end in the usual legal threats from publishers, but in the release of the papers on the JPL site. However, as he points out, this isn't about a few papers from NASA, however interesting they may be. This is about free access to all research that the public funds. Despite huge advances over the last decade, we're still some way from achieving that, which makes Eisen's latest victory for open access all the more welcome.

from the really-now? dept

We know that some legacy players who rely too heavily on copyright law seem to react negatively to any discussion of unauthorized distribution of files, but a group of German book publishers have apparently taken this to the next level. As highlighted on TorrentFreak, they've resorted to filing criminal complaints against two news websites, Der Tagesspiegel and Zeit.de, for publishing an interview with the creators of a website called Boox.to, which offers up unauthorized downloads of ebooks. Again, this is not the unauthorized site itself they filed the complaint over, but rather news websites for daring to name the site in the interview that was done.

“With the direct and multiple naming of the Internet address the reader is immediately aware of the illicit supply of the website. With regard to objective journalistic reporting there was no need for direct nomination,” the publishers write in their complaint.

“The publication of the Website and its Internet address immediately enabled a broad mass of readers to become aware of the site. The reader is also indirectly encouraged to take advantage of the offer, taking advantage of the illegal site that has been highlighted by the play of the interview.”

Of course, this raises the obvious retort: if publishing an interview helps make a "broad mass" of people more "aware of the site," what do they think filing a really stupid and ridiculous lawsuit against these websites will do?